THE EARTHLY CITY ON A HILL
In the course of human events, it becomes necessary to reiterate the historical reality that empires rise and empires fall. All great nations go through the entropy of history. We are not immune to this, and our empire will collapse as others have before us. We should not cheer or mourn but be prepared. “Keep awake”, as Jesus Christ commanded—be woke! When the empire falls—and fall it will—it is up to us to help build the “City of God” on its ruins. To join with all those comrades of good will and justice, to build a society worthy of God, and the values preached in the Gospels. As regards the American Empire, to paraphrase Augustine, “And therefore, as the plan of this work we have undertaken requires, and as occasion offers, we must speak also of the earthly city, which, though it be mistress of the nations, is itself ruled by its lust of rule.” (1)
When empires begin to decline and fall, certain symptoms arise from a moribund system desperately attempting to preserve the empire from collapse. Often these are an appeal to traditions and a mythologized history. As if a performative return to the way things were before will magically stop the material conditions in which the collapsing empire finds itself. Here religious nationalism emerges as one such attempt to arrest the decline by appealing to false piety to stop the inevitable. Rome tried it in the third to fifth centuries; reactionary Christian Nationalists in the United States try it now. The result is a heretical theology which grafts Christ to the nation, elevates the executive as God’s chosen “demi-messiah” to fix the nation, and celebrates the accumulation of wealth and protects the interests of the wealthy, and enshrines selfishness as the supreme virtue. All of this runs against the Gospel. The Christian message is reduced to a “consumer choice” of the blessed assurance that mere faith is a free ticket to heaven, that nothing else matters. The nation matters, America as supposedly blessed by God must be defended to the death, but Americans, and those who live in America, those lives can be picked and chosen as the individual chooses to defend and save. Christian nationalism is but a religious sheen on a nationalistic capitalism, which justifies a personal religion, and makes every vice a virtue, and every true Christian virtue a vice. This is the empire as it tries to stand now, a political economy based upon greed and legalized theft, given the sacred stamp of approval by those who claim Christ but make appeals to Mammon. Those same people would view those who defend, aid, uplift, and advocate for “the least among us” as spreading and practicing false teachings. They have already declared us heretics! We who take the teachings of Jesus seriously are now branded as the enemies of Christ! While those who make that accusation, worship Mammon as Christ! The unfortunate irony is that Christians were at once victims and perpetrators of Roman attempts at religious nationalism. Any attempt to combat the heresy of Christian nationalism must interrogate that history. Then each of their theologies while be tested by scripture and found to be merely idolatry, of Mammon over God, of nation above Jesus. Having identified, the ideas to reject let us work together to create the community and society that truly reflects the man we follow, and the Apostles we seek to imitate.
In the Third Century, the Roman empire began to breakdown. The system of imperial stability created by Augustus finally began to disintegrate. The century was marked by civil war, political instability, disease, foreign invasion, and economic instability. Emperors came and went at the pleasure of the troops in the army, no man was safe on the throne. In 251 CE, the Emperor Decius decided that perhaps religion could be marshalled to make Rome great again. If people could believe and worship the gods of old, perhaps those gods would restore the empire’s fortune. Certainly, the empire whom Virgil had Jupiter bless in his Aenid would not abandon the empire forever. So, Decius decreed that all citizens of the empire should make a mandatory sacrifice to the gods both as a sign of piety and as a sign of loyalty to the empire, in return for a token of proof that they had done so. Failure to do so would be considered an act of treason. One notable group refused—the Christians. The church had long been an annoying thorn in Rome’s side. An alternative community, whose values seemed antithetical to the empire. The church challenged the “civilized” ideas and norms of slavery, patriarchy, ethnonationalism, and wealth hierarchy. It was at the local level, highly organized with a system of bishops, priests and deacons. The church patiently waited for the apocalyptic day when Christ would return and sweep all empires away. This frightened the Imperial aristocracy, but since the church did not violently resist the empire, there was no legal framework to eliminate the Christians. Decius found a legal way to do just that. The decree was an attempt to shore up the empire’s piety and eliminate a cultural, and potential political threat to the empire from within. The resulting persecution was the heaviest the church had ever endured up until that time, beginning a period of persecution that would continue until Constantine. Decius’s plan failed. In fact, the crisis years lead to a boom in converts, as it was the Christians who braved the worst of the plague of that century to care for their Christian and non-Christian neighbors. The “sin of empathy” made Christianity possible as a world religion.
The persecutions would continue off and on over the century, reaching fever pitch with Diocletian. As with Decius, Diocletian was persuaded that the Christians were interfering with the empire getting back on the good side of the gods. Moreover, having a counter-hegemonic institution got in the way of the emperor’s plan of creating a divine monarchy, with Diocletian being seen as a divine being, Jupiter’s representative on earth ruling by divine right, using force of personality to reunify and stabilize the empire. Constantine ended the persecution but did not end Diocletian’s new imperial format. As a sleight of hand, Constantine said he was merely Christ’s earthly representative on Earth, a Vicar of Christ. While Constantine, was cautious about how far to make his empire Christian, the later emperor Theodosius was not. It was Theodosius who used the Roman formula of religious persecution to finally crush “paganism” in the empire. But Theodosius was the last great emperor, his male heirs incapable or incompetent in ruling the Western half of the empire. Frustrated after migrating into the empire at being barred from being a legitimate part of the Roman empire by a piously polytheistic and ethnocentric Senate, the Arian Christian Goths sacked Rome in 410. Thus, we see Christians as the victims and perpetrators of religious nationalism done in a forlorn hope to save an empire. The empire fell anyway. As our empire, the new Rome, faces a similar point of crisis and decline we would do well to note this history.
Today history is desired as a comfortable myth than a real telling of the facts. Our founding myth of course comes from a sermon. America is likened to the “shining city on the hill” a turn pf phrase borrowed from Matthew 5:14. John Winthrop may have used the phrase as a moral warning, intending that his community see themselves as pious exemplars for other Protestants to follow. (2) The phrase entered a new meaning with the Cold War for American Exceptionalism. Indeed, so much of modern American culture, politics and religion was born at the dawn of that conflict, in which the American empire achieved its predominance with the collapse of the European empires with World War 2 and its aftermath. In the context of the Red Scare of the 1950s, a new Christian revival was conceived as battling the “godless communism” of the Soviet Union. The revival was backed by American corporations with the mind to use religion to undo the New Deal, a series of policies enacted by an Episcopalian President, and advised by an Episcopalian Labor Secretary. In fact, going further back, it was businessmen alongside conservative theologians who had created the Fundamentals at the turn of the century. The movement combined nationalism, capitalism, and evangelical Protestantism into a movement to shape the Cold War religious imagination. It destroyed the Social Gospel movement and became the religious force in American politics in the 1980s. So successful is this movement that most people take it for granted that Christianity is what these rightwing evangelicals say it is.
This amalgamation of Christ with Nationalism and Capitalism, creates a contradiction which can only be solved by rejecting, though not overtly and consciously, entire parts of the Gospel in order to fit its theology. Thus, we have an extreme version of “Sola Fide” where mere belief that “Jesus is Lord” suffices. This is despite the moral teachings of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. Yet it fits well with nationalism, where one’s nation or people is supreme above all others, and capitalism, where one’s pursuit of wealth accumulation at other’s expense is now seen as a holy act. Jesus was neither a nationalist nor a capitalist. Yet in his name American empire is protected and celebrated. In his name Mammon becomes synonymous with him. In his name the most “least among us” are targets of scorn, violence, and poverty.
But they claim, “does not St. Paul in Romans say, ‘for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God’?” (3) Even those same people reject that verse as soon as a government they do not like is in office. The Hebrew Bible is filled with prophets protesting the wickedness and sins of their own rulers. Jesus himself called Herod “that fox” as an insult. Paul’s teaching might have been more practical advice so as to avoid giving the Roman government an excuse to persecute the church. What is clear from other texts in the scriptures is that God hates empire. The Exodus story is God using the plagues to bring and empire, the Egyptian, and Pharoah to its knees. In the process liberating the Israelites from slavery and leading them to new life in Canaan. John of Patmos’s Revelation is full of allegory but aimed at the Roman empire, using the term Babylon (the Hebrew pejorative for an oppressive empire). The clearest example of God’s condemnation of empire comes right from the devil. In one of the devil’s temptations of Jesus, Jesus is shown all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. The devil says to Jesus, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.” (4) Jesus rejects this and the price, worshipping the devil over God. Here is the ultimate rejection of Imperial authority, and the manifestation of Jesus’s kenotic nature. The fact that the devil is given all Imperial authority and gives it to anyone he pleases, fits well with Biblical suspicions of royal and imperial power. Yet time and again humanity chooses the opposite of Jesus, choosing empire. Perhaps it is the connection for our desire to turn “stones into bread,” a fear of scarcity or of self-importance and self-aggrandizement, as the temptation of jumping off the pinnacle to be rescued by angels illustrates. Jesus organized to usher in a kingdom “not of this world”, that is to say not of our understanding of human civilization. A kingdom completely different than the life humans had known for millennia. The organization of the church, and its strategy is the Mustard Seed strategy, that by growth and commitment, the church will uproot the empire and overtake it. Not as a replacement for empire, but as a new creation.
Yet despite our efforts, America followed Rome to imperial power, first on the Continent and Hemisphere and then globally. Our power grew as our reach grew. Like Rome, being born from the rejection of monarchy, the United States shudders at accepting we are an empire, but in the eyes of the rest of the world, we are. We take solace in our democratic norms and forms. Slogans like being the leader of the free world and making the world safe for democracy echo in our minds. Heroic myths of our founding, understanding the Civil War as waged to emancipate the slaves, and World War 2 fought to defeat fascism and liberate Europe help obfuscate our imperialism. Christian Nationalism combines a defense of historical myths with theological language.
After decades of being the unquestioned global hegemon, our power is waning. At home, certain domestic economic policies sold to American citizens, to grow and preserve American wealth and economic stability have proven false, only empowering a small group of the wealthy in the process. The slow withering of our Constitution, the ineffectiveness of the government to provide for most working Americans, the inability of the United States to prevent China’s growing power on the world stage, these and other recent disasters illustrate an empire on the downward trajectory of history.
Despite all this, Christian Nationalists continue to enshrine the idea of the United States as the “shinning city on the hill” borrowing and repurposing the phrase from Matthew (5) and Winthrop, a term that since the Cold War has become synonymous with American Exceptionalism and sees that exceptionalism as indicative of divine blessing. (6) Any critique of American policies, especially ones Christian Nationalists prefer, is seen as going against God. Is criticism of the state blasphemous? The Bible admittedly is a complex interweaving of stories in support of the kings of the united kingdom of Israel and stories and prophets critical of nearly every monarch the Israelites had. No kingdom remains blessed by God for just being. The history of the kingdom of Israel is proof of that. God’s blessings are conditional upon nations. Whenever a nation acts righteously towards all people, God bestows favor, but upon those who do not God hides his face from them and raises up prophets in protest. These prophets were routinely condemned by the religious nationalists of their day. Jeremiah railed against the temple establishment:
Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’ For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place. (7)
How much would those Christian Nationalists, for whom the scripture is the literal word of God, ignore these words of Jeremiah! How many times do the celebrate with glee the oppression of the alien, even if many of them are also fellow Christians! How much do they accept the impoverishment of the widow and orphan. How easy they fall into the temptations of the “other god” Mammon and give into the devil’s temptation of Imperial power! How they would grieve in their hearts for the rich man condemned in the parable who ignored Lazarus, knowing the myriad Lazaruses they ignore and tell others to ignore, allowing them to die quietly and in obscurity. How much do they tell us to make interests with our talents for the good of the landowner, misleading Christians because those talents were never theirs. In misreading the parable, they do exactly what Jesus condemned, perpetuating cycles and systems of exploitation and inflicting pain upon others. They protect those who “reap what they did not sow, take what they did not deposit” and denounce as lazy those who criticize and refuse to participate in that system of inequality. “The innocent one”, as James calls Jesus in his epistle, (8) they unknowingly condemn Christ to protect their interests and the interest of the rich.
Deep down our religious nationalism, as with that of the Romans, is borne out of fear and anxiety. The fear of change and collapse. Modern Christian fundamentalism arose to combat the perceived dangers of Darwin, Marx, and higher criticism of the Bible. These were perceived as threats to the centuries of status quo which were comfortable to most Protestants. The triumph of Christian fundamentalism came with the capture of the Republican party in the United States beginning in the 1980s. It is a movement to entrench white, male, Christian, capitalist hegemony in American culture and institutions, seeking to preserve what they felt and what they had been taught to believe as the “correct order of things.” And this is at the heart of the matter, they fear the death of what they knew, never pausing to consider that through death springs new life. Their Christianity has become a Christianity of using the Bible as an idol in of itself to lean on and wave to claim supernatural authority over things being challenged. They would be wise to examine scripture itself, for the things they believe God ordains for America, Jesus condemns. The project of political hegemony is the creation of a new tower of Babel. God does not like empire. In Exodus he brought Pharoah and the Egyptian empire to its knees. By the Resurrection he took Rome’s greatest terror weapon, the cross, and rendered its power impotent. The cross was transformed from a symbol of terror into a symbol of hope. Jesus’s mustard seed strategy was meant to uproot the Roman empire, and whatever Babylon is that empire will surely be overthrown when Jesus returns.
So why empire? Why nationalism? Love of country is an understandable feeling. The new crusading impulse is to expand liberty and freedom to make America more than just a home, transforming it into an ideal and a calling. But that calling must be judged and critiqued to see it if is true. The calling now is not to have liberty and justice for all, but to expand the power and influence of those who only wish for their viewpoint to be law. Christian nationalists want theocracy, or at least they want to create something that they believe is theocracy. Ironically for all of their celebration of the founding of the United States, they forget that our founding fathers knew of such experiments and hated them. One need to look no further than New England in the 1600s and the violence, witch trials and chaos in the attempt to make a theocratic republic there. If you told George Washington or Benjamin Franklin that America is a Christian nation, they would reply “which Christianity?” Christianity certainly was not a unified concept in 1787, each colony having its own majority denomination. A secular republic was their ideal and their only choice. Yet that history is forgotten by men who want to return us to the days of 1692 Salem.
I fear that we have at last reached the reductio ad absurdum of the Protestant Reformation. The focus on Sola Scriptura has simply made the Bible an idol to be waved around, its words chosen to lean on to support repugnant ideas. What is more in keeping with scripture—those who stand up and protest against injustice and are tear gassed or the President who tear gassed them holding a Bible where they were tear gassed for a photo op? What do we mean by the “word of God” as Christians? Is it the Word of God made flesh. The Word is the example of Jesus’s life, his teachings, and yes, his salvific death and resurrection.
Sola Fide has been reduced to making Christianity a “consumer religion”. The only thing that matters is faith, belief that Jesus died for you, and thus assures you that you will not be condemned to hell. This has reduced Jesus to merely being a means to an end. Focusing on the atonement focuses only on the Passion story, cutting out most of the Synoptic Gospels, and half of the Gospel of John. Here we see a divergence in the point of Jesus. If we take the view on focusing on the Incarnation, we see a total picture of Christ. We see a greater version of atonement than just not being condemned to hell, by showing us the way to life through his own life. Jesus opens the way to the Father, by having us imitate him. And this view allows for the atonement for it is the final act of reconciliation, the final victory over death and the Devil. By seeing the Incarnation, we understand the context of Jesus, the deeper meaning of his teachings, and by being embodied Jesus asks us to act. James in his epistle says “faith without works is dead,” (9) for James simply believing in Christ while doing nothing for one’s neighbor was sinful. Indeed, Jesus’s said the greatest commandment was to love God fully and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The last judgement is not about how hard you believed or how much you prayed, or what tenants of belief you believed or defended, or how many people you evangelized. Those are important in their own context, but the last judgement is about how did you treat other people. Did you feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit the lonely. Did you make people’s lives materially better or not?
Christian nationalists have no interest in these things on a national or communal scale. Their concept of “the nation” is set within gendered and racial boundaries and hierarchies, grounded in their use of scripture and the ways society used to be constructed. The less fortunate are seen indeed as less, so much like Lazarus in the parable. They would condemn abortion as murder but would refuse to have the government spend a dime or increase taxes to ensure that the baby has a full and fulfilling life, cared for from womb to tomb. Faith over works matters, charity is nice as a personal thing, but it is never spoken of as a social obligation, nor a national necessity. Promoting the general welfare might be in the US Constitution, but no Christian Nationalist would take it seriously as government uplift. Instead, the idea is to use one’s talents to make interest for the landowner, the man who would be king. For thrift and craft are holy and you should be productive and not complain. As long as you believe you are assured a place in heaven, there is no extra requirement.
And of course, we come to the ultimate manifestation of this theology with the Rapture. The idea is not as old as some would have you believe, coming into being in the nineteenth century. (10) It combines the book of Revelation with an of quote by Paul in 1st Thessalonians of “meeting the Lord in the air” at the Resurrection. (11) It fits the American consumer ethos perfectly. Not only can one get a place in heaven purchased by Jesus’s death, but one can even escape the tribulation at the end of the world. Nowhere in John of Patmos’s apocalyptic text does this happen. John emphasizes the need for Christians to endure the things that are to come and the wrath of the Beast from Babylon. For Americans, though, why deal with that inconvenience, when the true believers will be whisked away to avoid all that unpleasantness. This bad theology has another dark side—an indifference to the world. Why worry about climate change, when God’s chosen will be taken up and Jesus will return, forgetting of course God making us stewards and caretakers of the Earth to begin with? Why worry about poverty and one’s neighbor when all of that will end with Jesus returning? This inaction combined with an absolutist view of sola fide leads to a political stance of wanting to preserve white male patriarchy and wealth, and Christian privilege, while never creating a politics about the “weightier matters of the law.” This is Christianity reduced to a consumer religion of comfort while being a religion of power of a select few to rule over the many.
And if you wanted another theology perfectly tailored to Christian Nationalism, it is the prosperity gospel. That wealth is a blessing of God. The more you have the more God apparently favors you. And God will even bless you more if you would just donate some of your hard-earned wealth to your Christian Preacher of choice. Indulgences by another name, Johann Tetzel has his revenge, and Martin Luther is raging in his grave or from heaven. For an American audience who is taught the supposed righteousness of capitalism, this all makes sense. Obviously in a capitalist country, wealth is seen as a blessing from God, how could it not. This ignores however every condemnation of wealth in the Bible, especially by Jesus. How is wealth a blessing by God when “the love of money is the root of all evil?” (12) How is wanting a rich man desirable when there is a gulf or divide between the rich and Heaven? The apostles criticized the accumulation of wealth, so did the Cappadocian Fathers. Monasticism was borne out of fear that wealth would destroy that early communal part of the faith. Benedict, being the most extreme, did not just ban private property, but his monks from even having personal property. The answer is always the same—communal ownership of wealth. “To each according to one’s need.” (13) Of course, these Christian Nationalists would ignorantly dismiss this line of scripture as Communism. Jesus said one cannot serve God or Mammon, but American Christian Nationalists always try. Imperialism is the highest stage of wealth accumulation. As power is exerted in various ways for a Nation to get from others what it does not have. Jesus would have felt this, felt the power of Rome. The unsaid part of the Parable of the ten pounds is that the foreign country the nobleman went to become king was Rome. The new king will get a cut from the slaves who now lord over those cities to get their own cut, and Rome from the king will get want they want. The American empire might be nicer at least to (some of) us Americans, but for many Christians around the world it is no less vicious, no less exploitative. As our empire declines, these global Christians rejoice. For we are Babylon to them. Prosperity theology is a theology which enshrines an exploitative economic system as ordained by God, leading to a global exploitative empire blessed by God. The protection of which is a holy duty. Yet it is a heresy, the clearest I have ever seen, running directly counter to the sum of all Biblical teachings about wealth, about how one should treat one’s neighbor, and what the actual God ideal economic system is.
The socialist Rosa Luxemburg once said, “The proletarian revolution can reach full clarity and maturity only by stages, step by step, on the Golgotha-path of its own bitter experiences in struggle, through defeats and victories.” (14) She wrote those words at the death of her own empire. What Luxemburg implied, and what we Christians assert, is that Easter is coming! As with her we are watching the death of an empire. But through death comes new life.
The American people are about to enter the political and social wilderness, if we are not there already. The wilderness symbolically has always been a place of contemplation and purification, a location for testing. The wilderness was where through rigorous discipline the Israelites learned an entire new way of living, through God’s commandments before the entered the promised land. They were detached from the old empire in which they had been in bondage. A new way of living based upon the commandments of Godhad to be politically, economically, and socially ingrained in the children of Israel over forty painstaking years. In the wilderness, for forty days Jesus endured the wilderness, preparing himself for his ministry ahead, withstanding the assaults of the devil. In both cases there was the temptation to return. Return to the previous modes and thought forms of civilization. The Israelites grumbled at their scarcity, believing it was better to be a slave than to be without comfort. Jesus withstood the temptations of self-sufficiency, self-importance, and imperial power. The first monastics also went to the wilderness, to escape the creeping imperialization of the church. The Desert Fathers and Mothers wanted to protect the revolutionary practices of the church in their lives. Monasticism throughout the medieval period was always the more radical part of Christianity. The Reformation could have broken these forms into public life more broadly instead of cloistering them, instead nascent capitalism conquered the minds of Europeans.
For us who are now in the wilderness, this is the supreme Lenten journey. Like the Israelites cast off from the old empire, we must endeavor to train ourselves to return to the Lord to remember and keep his commandments, to prepare to live in the Promised Land. Like the Desert Fathers and Mothers, we must also build up communities to be an example, to regain that radical part of the early church. We travel and pray with Jesus in the wilderness to understand our role in God’s plan, to join with Jesus in the mission of proclaiming and building God’s Kingdom here on Earth. We are with Jesus in the tomb, crucified by empire, but in three days we will be raised to live on a New Earth, with a New Heaven. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (15) The death of an empire, brings forth new hopes, new possibilities, a new creation. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” (16), with God’s help. The old decaying wood is cut down, or burned, allowing the plants once stifled to rise into the sun. Rather than lament the death of the empire, we should prepare ourselves as if this is a political Lent. We as Christians should feel a call to organize our communities, help “the least among us”, and the evangelize in the Franciscan method of “preach the Gospel always, sometimes using words.” People now as in the beginning centuries of the church, are far more impressed and attracted by what people of a religion do much more than what they say. How we treat our neighbors, the radical values that we practice, win far more converts. By joining together with people of all good will especially the poor, the working class, and the lowly, let us then embrace this Lenten discipline, and build within ourselves the virtues we need to build with God the Kingdom here and now. Let us embrace the wilderness as a place of change as we venture to that “undiscovered country”! And let us heed the words of God spoken through Isaiah which form part of the Ash Wednesday lectionary as we rebuild once returning from our own exile:
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.” (17)
Amen! Maranatha!
Augustine, City of God. Book I, Preface.
John Winthrop “A Model of Christian Charity”, 1630
Romans 13:1
Luke 4:6
Matthew 5:14
Note: Ironically first publicly used in this context by the Catholic President-Elect John F. Kennedy in a speech on January 9, 1961.
Jeremiah 7:4-7a
James 5:6
James 2:17
Note: The idea of the Rapture stems from John Nelson Darby’s interpretation of the Bible in 1833.
1 Thessalonians 4:17
1 Timothy 6:10
Acts 4:35
Rosa Luxemburg “What Does the Spartacus League Want?”, December 1918.
John 12:24
Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Isaiah 58:6-8a, 9b-12
